Apple unveils M6 Mac mini and new Mac Studio in Cook's final week

Apple introduced a new Mac mini and a new Mac Studio on Tuesday, refreshing both desktops around its latest chips in what amounts to the company's last major product launch of the Tim Cook era. Cook hands the chief executive role to hardware veteran John Ternus on September 1, a transition Apple announced earlier this year. Pre-orders for both machines opened on August 25 in 30 countries, with deliveries starting September 22.

The new Mac mini comes in two versions. The entry model debuts the M6, which The Verge reports is Apple's first chip built on a 2-nanometer process. It pairs a 12-core CPU with a 12-core GPU that, for the first time on the mini, builds a Neural Accelerator into every graphics core, alongside a dual 16-core Neural Engine and memory bandwidth of 170GB/s. Apple claims up to four times faster AI performance, twice the graphics and storage speed, and 40 percent faster CPU performance than the M4 generation. The step-up model uses the M5 Pro with up to an 18-core CPU, a 20-core GPU, support for 64GB of unified memory and Thunderbolt 5. Both gain Wi-Fi 7, Bluetooth 6 and 2.5-gigabit Ethernet as standard.

Pricing moved upward. The M6 Mac mini starts at $899 and the M5 Pro model at $1,699 — each $100 above the most recent starting prices of the outgoing M4 generation, according to The Verge, which notes the previous minis had become hard to find amid unexpectedly strong demand for compact machines that run AI agents around the clock.

The new Mac Studio scales considerably further. The M5 Max configuration offers an 18-core CPU, up to a 40-core GPU and 128GB of unified memory from $2,499, while the M5 Ultra version reaches a 36-core CPU, an 80-core GPU and up to 512GB of unified memory from $5,499 — enough, Apple says, to run very large language models entirely on the device. The company claims up to 4.3 times faster AI performance than the previous generation, and Thunderbolt 5 now allows several Mac Studio units to be clustered for up to three times faster distributed inference. The 512GB configuration follows in late October.

Both desktops ship with macOS 27, which The Verge identifies by the name Golden Gate, along with the next generation of Apple Intelligence and the new Siri AI. The software is in public beta now and is expected to be generally available by the time the hardware arrives.

The timing gives the launch an unusual weight. Cook, who has led Apple for roughly 15 years, becomes executive chairman next week, while Ternus — long the public face of the company's hardware — takes over as chief executive. The press releases already hint at the reshuffle: the Mac mini announcement quotes Johny Srouji with the title of chief hardware officer.